User:Pinkville/WP political culture

WP Political Culture

analysis & notes towards improvement


 * different classes of people within WP
 * far too much power concentrated in (certain) individuals' hands
 * lack of transparency
 * lack of accountability
 * unreasonably complicated structure - communications, decision-making
 * far too much activity behind scenes vs. the encyclopaedia itself
 * high school-like cliquery
 * lack of real collaboration on large scale
 * centrifugal force - occult authority
 * obscurantism - abbreviations, code words, U vs. non-U
 * dispersal of discussion, issues over many pages - some with limited access - IRC, emails, etc.
 * "WP is not a democracy", as though this should be a point of pride

Village Pump - consensus

I think this is an increasingly important question. As WP grows - and as its many layers of "behind the scenes" discussion/policy, etc. pages grow exponentially - the community is becoming more and more dispersed, with local agglomerations of concentrated decision-making power. Many editors are (justifiably) content to run up their edit counts or work diligently on specific articles/projects without regard to the greater WP context: the social and political structure that the encyclopaedic content resides in. But the policy and administrative decisions that are being made - with or without the input of editors - affect the content of the encyclopaedia itself and the community that has grown around it. I'm pondering these questions and more, but I'm glad to see that other WP folks are as well.

This is the problem caused (partly) by the great dispersal of discussions in WP... Decisions are being made without many editors having any idea what's happening. At the same moment that key policy decisions are made without most editors being aware, many editors are changing content regardless (without awareness) of policy... In other words, there's a serious gap between policy-setters and editors. That's the context for your question... and your point - that editors don't participate in policy discussion - is an additional element in this fragmented community in which the invocation of consensus is nearly farcical. Every vote, straw poll, AfD discussion, etc is tainted by this situation... There are a lot of features in WP that contribute to this centrifugal force - that make it difficult for users to have a real grasp of what's going on (without spending a lot of time and effort exploring dispersed discussion pages), and that for that reason make it very difficult to achieve meaningful consensus on any issue.

ArbCom election question:

Wikipedia is a community that produces and maintains a (still-nascent) encyclopaedia. This community has particular social and political structures that define it and that, presumably, affect the character, quality, and depth of its encyclopaedic output. Can you briefly summarise some political and social aspects of the Wikipedia community that you consider important or noteworthy, that perhaps need to be challenged or developed? How does the structure of Wikipedia encourage or inhibit access to decision-making and issues of power/control? Or does any of that matter? And what are the implications for the Arbitration Committee and its members?

in other news....


 * the absurdity of "criticism" sections in biographical articles
 * criticisms of a person's views or deeds should be worked organically into the article, not isolated in a 'framing' section
 * similar issue with controversy, etc.
 * these are tainted/tainting words


 * infoboxes